Orange Life
A huge fire consumed this building the night before.
Why did I join the facebook? (For a quick definition of facebook: it’s like an interactive yearbook spanning your high school and college careers). Anyhow, the above question sprang into my mind today as I looked at my “confirm friends” page and realized that the two people listed on it are not people I would call friends and are either (a) insecure folk who simply are trying to increase the number of people listed under their “is friends with” column; or are (b) random celebrities listed by people too bored to do something constructive and original with their spare time. I joined facebook because everyone else did, I admit it. Sometimes I wish there were bandwagons for reading good books or learning to paint or something. Just think of the thousands of hours wasted by people clicking around on facebook when they could have been learning something. People are crazy.
I classified this post as “media,” meaning I will go on to talk about other ways I have been spending my media time lately. Here is a crazy-amazing list of songs and albums you should listen to.
William Ackerman - Returning
Great solid mellow guitar album. The way he uses the guitar reminds me of the way George Winston uses the piano - he lets the instrument speak out with its full range of voices.
Train - Drops of Jupiter - Mississippi
An unexpectedly un-poppy gem on an otherwise mediocre album. Flows just like the river of its namesake.
Guster - Keep It Together - Come Downstairs and Say Hello
‘Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes/Right in tune with dark side of the moon’ - songs just don’t begin much better. Listen for it to turn into a building ethereal Coldplay-esque anthem later in the song; perfect.
Death Cab for Cutie - The Photo Album - Why You’d Want to Live Here
Death Cab sings about weather a lot: here, that certainly works for him. His lyrics paint the gritty LA just as well as the music grinds out the sounds of a city.
Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek - Speak for Yourself
Best electronic effect of the past … 3 years. Essentially, she’s layering her vocal tracks and sustaining them to make them sound like an organ. Unreal good.
Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American - Get It Faster
Creepiest beginning to a rock song I have ever heard. Listen to the way the guitars switch at split second intervals from distorted to clean and back beginning at 2:26 - fun to listen to.
Maybe I will write these “media” posts more often. There are movies, music, and books all the time.
I took 40+ pictures of fireworks, all bad. Fortunately, this picture of the crowd turned out really cool: the glowsticks people were carrying blurred through in a really neat way.
Idaho honors Napoleon Dynamite - Best wording for a resolution. Ever.
I am unsure how much more of this I can take: dial-up internet is the worst thing to happen to this decade, and I am stuck on what seems to be the last copper-line connection to the internet out of anyone I know. I recently read that over one half of the people who use the internet are not using dial-up. And don’t get me wrong - the internet is something I rely on to do my job - I’m not complaining because I can’t watch streaming video on MTV’s website when I spend hours mindlessly surfing. In fact, dial-up works quite well for the surfing I do - generally reading longer articles, allowing things to load in the background.
It’s when I try to be productive that I get eff’ed.
The size of files I am shuffling around for work drive me absolutely batty. In the middle of some pieces of work, I’ve actually considered driving 20 minutes to the University just so I could do what I had to do and be done with it. You know things are bad when, no matter how long you stare at the blue horizontal progress bar, it never progresses towards 100%. You just have to walk away and let the files molasses’ize their way through the Cu world of 19th century communication.
I know one man who has survived on dial-up: Justin. And talk about survive: he administers an entire online business via this dial-up connection. I have frequently hypothesized that his access to a dedicated T1 line is the only thing that keeps him sane.
So, what is your current online experience? And what was it like to make the switch to high speed?
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